Reliable data protection solutions are becoming increasingly important as the usage of and reliance upon electronic data continue to increase. For example, data of numerous business processes may be entirely or substantially electronically stored. Exemplary processes including accounting systems, administrative (e.g., docketing, calendaring, recordkeeping, etc.) systems, email systems, etc. may generate significant amounts of electronic data. It is important to protect against loss of the generated electronic data.
Accordingly, high capacity data protection storage devices are becoming commonplace in numerous implementations, such as libraries, and backup and archive configurations, for example. It is desired for these arrangements to provide storage capabilities with minimal interrupts of the host system being protected. Increased speed, accessibility and reliability are additionally desired for providing short or long-term storage of digital data.
Various types of storage media may be used in different data protection solutions. Exemplary types of media include disk and/or tape, although others may be used. Tape systems provide benefits of relatively simplistic design and reduced cost, but suffer from drawbacks of having relatively inflexible designs, and relatively slow speeds.
During an initial backup operation, data protection storage systems may store baseline versions of files. Thereafter, delta versions of the files may be created during subsequent backup operations which define differences between the subsequent versions of the files and the original versions of the respective files. If the capacity of a subsystem of a data protection storage system is consumed, backups with respect to the subsystem are halted, or data is moved to another subsystem and the changes may be recorded for subsequent retrieval. Such movement of data may be significant (e.g., all baselines and deltas for an entire protected computer dataset). Movement of significant amounts of data may require a relatively large amount of data traffic between plural subsystems and have a major impact on performance of the data protection storage system.